our continue. things are so bad that might actually be time for a revolution. and it turns out that a popular drink of starbucks has a surprising. thank . you get back to our g.'s coverage of the twenty twelve presidential election i'm tom hartman and i'm christine for us now so where does the race for the white house stand here at ten pm eastern is a look at the electoral map right now it's one hundred sixty three electoral votes

for governor romney one hundred sixty two for president obama still kind of frozen . yeah ten thirty here. still a lot we don't know we're going to wait for more results to come in who want to take a look right now at several ballot measures that people across the united states are voting on in california it's proposition thirty seven this would require mandatory labeling of genetically engineered food the food industry is fighting this issue but polls show that this will probably half the polls in california don't close until eleven pm eastern now in colorado voters are deciding if they should legalize marijuana and with twenty one percent reporting it's fifty two percent to forty eight percent in support of the measure that does call for legalizing marijuana and regulating like we do alcohol and washington state also has a marijuana reform vote on the ballot pulling a show that measure is likely to pass and i think we did see it passed in massachusetts is that right yup that was medical marijuana. so it's going to be

interesting to see this administration i think they're going to change their tune some of these issues also four states are voting on gay marriage and for the first time backers of marriage equality believe it will be approved at the ballot box residents of washington state are voting on that issues there and all the polls indicated it should pass in maryland it was called prop six polls have been closed with thirty three percent of the vote in fifty want to forty nine percent is the poll is the. vote so far favor of. marriage equality in that state in maine still the same thing the votes are still being counted in minnesota for gay marriage so joining us now to talk more about these ballot measures is greg palast that's to get a journalist from ohio and attorney alexis bad marriage for the maiden marriage my apologies a political director for indiana consumers association license good to see you again. greg welcome to the program. glad to be here

from toledo and the center of the heist oh you're in the center of the action here . gregg talk a little bit about some of these ballot measures what do you think a is going to be most significant here. well what i'm concerned about right now the reason i ended up here in ohio is tips i got that once again we're back to what happened in two thousand and four with ohio being the center of the heist of the presidency we've had you know let's not forget it comes down to ohio and what i saw on sunday and reported go to greg palast dot com you'll see it would be my film report is that the early voting souls to the polls which is when most black people don't hire a vote it's most segregated voting in the united states black people vote early white people vote on election day the elect the early voting voters in some of the biggest cities like date where i was were not given ballots i want to repeat that

not hundreds of thousand photos not given bounce or given applications for absentee ballots they converted them on the spot to absentees they are not regular ballots are subject to change we figure a fourth of them will now be lost white voters today were given regular ballots when i was it the date on sunday other than one single polling place where the main day for voting for black people efficient counts when i was in the line i agree with it. thousand waiting to vote there four hours ago three thousand people being processed through hours and hours and hours of waiting and going through monkey business and then not getting a real ballot. the. cetera but you know the game is i just did like voting day here here jay leno down the street i want to see i'm going to like lines were but there weren't any lines zero you could they were ok when. space available when there were voters greg let me just interrupt you because

i do want to get to some of these ballot measures and alexa certainly one of these is something that you are pretty passionate about this is the one in my home state of california talk a little bit about you know labeling foods in california we're fighting for our right to know what we're eating right now only a quarter of the public is actually aware that they're already eating to medically modified foods and so we just don't know what we're eating people are completely unaware seventy five percent of us say they think they've never eaten anything to medically modified so in california we have a ballot initiative that would give us that simple right foods would be labeled may contain genetically modified organisms now critics of this critics of this say that they are concerned that if it's labeled that you're eating a genetically modified food people are going to freak out they say there's no evidence that these foods do any more harm to you than you know if it wasn't and they also say that's going to drive up food prices well the argument about food

prices is completely specious it's just has no basis in fact not even in the fact that the opposition site they claim that food prices will rise four hundred dollars that's the cost of switching from g.m.o. ingredients to organic ingredients under their studies that they paid for the cost of gym a label's under their studies that they paid for is twenty three dollars so if they had run ads in california saying oh your grocery prices are going to rise. by twenty three dollars a year i don't think anyone would vote against the initiative based on that argument the studies that we cite which are independent studies that we did not pay for say that the cost of labeling is negligible companies change their labels every six months at least once a year and it doesn't have any impact on the price of our food there's a larger issue to g.m.o. is is there not this is not just about do i want to eat something that. isn't

organic or isn't even natural. genetically modified organisms are actually altering the biosphere. that's right once they become part of our environment we can't call them back so now we have many crops that are engineer to produce their own insecticides crops that are engineer to resist herbicide so they can have endless amounts of herbicide sprayed on them which of course gets into our food and these traits now are in the food supply forever these traits will not go away they will continue to contaminate natural versions of these crops so once this technology is out there can't be recalled are we seeing you're referencing bt corn so is there a file as it produces its own insecticide and and roundup ready products. are we seeing b t resistance now appearing in insects and has that bt the ability to generate beachy the toxin has that now jumped into other plants in the

wild weeds in the wild i mean it's just messing with the whole system that's right it's an environmental concern it's also a health and safety concern for human beings who eat these things because the plant itself has d.n.a. that produces an insecticide scientists have long been concerned about horizontal gene transfer the problem of the genes that are in the plant transferring to i got bacteria so not only might be m. sex develop the bt gene or the herbicide reserve. gene might be transferred to weeds but we might have these genes in our gut flora that's a very scary prospect for those people like yourself in favor of this piece of legislation the ballot measure why is it that it took until now till two thousand and twelve to have this on the ballot i mean you call it having the right to know what we eat why haven't we had the right to know what we what we eat you know ten years ago twelve years ago well say this the companies that control these products

these patented seeds they also control the policy on these issues in the government monsanto have a lawyer and lobbyist who work for them putting together these qualities for the company that then works for the food and drug administration during the bush administration the clinton administration and now the obama administration michael taylor is currently a food safety czar in the obama administration so when you have that type of infiltration of the government by multinational corporations you get policies that leave out the interests of consumers. certainly a lot of other important ballot initiatives to talk about here are you familiar with really valid issues to deal with and i've been watching the ballot initiatives on gay marriage and on marijuana legalization and also medical marijuana and the state next door to us maryland and could be the first state to actually have the voters decide certainly the other states where gay gay marriage is legal it's because of courts or other but this could be the first state what's the

significance of it well yeah the voters have voted on this issue thirty two times against the right of people to marry whomever they choose whether it's a woman or a man you know it seems like. a personal choice we don't want to get into other people's bedrooms or their choices that they make about their families but voters can be also conservative when it comes to the polls i think even if we voted on something like whether black people could marry white people we might see some states vote very conservatively and racist really on that issue we did back in you know right up until we should i recollect was a saying even more white today the latter degree though if i may go to the earning day marriage we've certainly seen i know that when i was in california four years ago obama of course one big there proposition eight passed and that was to ban gay marriage gay marriage had been implemented for a few months and the ban on gay marriage was put into place but as an attorney are

you surprised at. how many states game marriage again marriage ban is being put into place thirty states i believe have some form of ban on gay marriage maybe in their constitutions they've minnesota's considering putting a ban on gay marriage into their constitution and this election yes these are these are very mean spirited laws and the courts finally struck down the mean spirited laws that would deny gay people their right to to claim. romer versus the other thought lawsuit and and finally the supreme court said that you cannot deprive a class of people of their civil rights and that was on the issue of whether they can just be treated equally as people not on the issue of marriage but hopefully will one day like we did with black people marrying white people it seems like a no brainer now but that required a supreme court decision to what extent do you think. we just have

a minute or so left or to what extent do you think that the amount of religious money that is poured into these things in the past is now either dissipating we're being ignored yeah well it's exciting to see the proponents of gay marriage be able to raise more money than their opposition now the it's shifted a bit and i think it's just because people you know that's not all coming just from gay people that's like ten percent of the population you know there are allies and friends and supporters and people who just don't want to be told who they can marry we're all stepping into this and getting involved and that's very exciting well it's her new lexus made mary thanks so much we were speaking with greg palast investigative journalist earlier but we lost him we want to thank him as well for joining us and we'll be back with more our to election coverage in just a moment. here's

mitt romney trying to figure out the. thing that the american. no one. i want to feature a little. italy. are going to distract us from what you and i should care about because they're a profit driven industry that sells us sensationalistic garbage he calls it breaking news i'm out to martin and we're going to break that.

welcome to the capital of i'm lauren lyster. what drives the world the fear mongering used by politicians who makes decisions to break through it's already been made who can you trust no one who is human and with the global scene where we had

a state controlled capital it's called sasha's when nobody dares to ask we do our teen question more. thank. you we want to give you a live look right now this is the obama campaign headquarters in chicago illinois the crowd starting to gather there of course this is that time of night where everybody's sort of crossing their fingers not wanting to get too excited yet tom as it's happening right now everything sort of going according to the polls no big surprises yet tonight you know i think that this is you know very clearly the case and florida now is it has been called it's still very very close and get the exact number we have ninety one point four percent of the precincts

reporting it's obama forty nine point seven to romney forty nine point five well it's very very tight but if obama takes florida there is no way for romney to win the presidency as of now however over romney does have one hundred seventy four electoral votes obama one sixty two these are the states that have been called as of now so so once again romney with one seventy four along with one sixty two awaiting florida we will most likely find out florida before we find out the results of virginia and ohio but if we do as you say it's mathematically. it's already bill clinton would say it's a religion it's a. what the other the other interesting fact at this moment i mean you know the ninety one percent reporting is that if we're looking at a a three tenths of one percent spread between romney and obama gary johnson the libertarian candidate took five tenths of one percent in floor presumably away from

romney's so you know there may be if this if these numbers continue to play out and obama ends up holding florida right the third any candidate important to consider you're going to have you're going to have people on the you're never publicans complaining about gary johnson the way democrats were complaining about red meat in two thousand. voters for in two thousand so i'm very familiar with that debate. and it was right. no matter who wins the presidential election tonight one thing is certain whomever is elected president will have incredible influence over the shaping of the supreme court especially considering multiple justices maybe retiring over the course of the next four years so what would a mitt romney supreme court nominee look like or what would a president obama nominee look like will he seek to create one of the most progressive courts in history joining me now is katrina vanden heuvel journalist and publisher of the nation magazine katrina welcome back great to see you thank

you tom thank you thanks for joining us how what would a romney supreme court look like in your opinion tom i think you need only to look at who romney's judicial chief judicial adviser is robert bork a man who in one nine hundred eighty seven was rejected by the u.s. senate for being so out of the mainstream. for his opposition not only to roe v wade his belief that the equal protection clause did not apply to women his opposition to the civil rights act of one thousand nine hundred sixty four his belief that corporations have more rights than people and a whole parcel of issues that then lead the senate to reject him he is mitt romney's chief judicial advisor and i think if you want to understand what mitt romney would do you need to look at the last ten years or so of the right wing do real men of the supreme court beginning with bush v gore which was

a masterpiece of judicial activism a supreme court intervening in a democratic process to stop the vote take that out to citizens united decision you have written and talked a lot about which unleashed corporate treasury money into our politics you would see those policies those issues ramped up exponentially in a mitt romney supreme court would you expect to hear challenges to roe v wade as well yes i think you'd hear challenges to roe v wade i think you'd see an attempt to gut the voting rights act i think you'd see the real culmination of the forty plus year campaign to take over the courts. first outlined in the lewis powell memo a memo written for the chamber of commerce a force which has grown too strong and ugly in our politics today are you few months before nixon appointed paul to the supreme court but that memo is the blueprint for the right wing seizure of the courts and other institutions in our

society and i think mitt romney and robert bork at his side would use that blueprint very assiduously and carefully to undertake an even larger expansion of the courts and other institutions katrina some are concerned that it may even go beyond that would that we could see the court rolled back ninety nine hundred sixty or one hundred fifty but to nine hundred thirty six to the year before the court started a green with franklin roosevelt and when the court was claiming the child labor laws were a violation of the right to contract unions didn't have legal rights these kind of no i think tom you were witnessing a moment very comparable to the moment when the supreme court in the roosevelt era tried to invalidate some of the key civilizing advances legal about advances of our time whether it was labor relations or as you cited child labor laws i think what

we are facing at this moment is. a turning point either we go forward to would be a more just diverse fair society or we witness the dismantling the rolling back the turning back of the cultural social economic gains and rights of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty first century it is truly not overstating it the truth of the moment we are and katrina in either case isn't there a really really strong case to be made that regardless of how electoral politics goes regardless of who's in office regardless of how does this election or any others shake out as time goes on that movement politics is really should be first and foremost in or at least you know first among equals in the minds of progressives would you know you couldn't say it you couldn't have said it better tom there is no question that let us say tonight president obama is reelected his

reelection is vital but not sufficient for progressive reform or revival nor to be honest have supreme court decisions come down from on high and been truly implemented in our society without movements at their side i think of brown versus board of education one nine hundred fifty four but it took years of civil rights movement action and activism to really make that a reality for millions of people so the movement pressure will be critical on all fronts but without a corps that is open minded that is truly fair that is just that that believes in the rule of law i'm not talking right left here talking the rule of law it will be much harder to build and find that space for movements to do the critical work they need to do in our country and speaking of electoral politics and movement politics as well as in the nation has done a great job of covering much of this we have seen

a real distortion of our. our political system particularly over the last decade as karl rove's influence has become so significant from from. what you mentioned the bush v gore ruling but right up through citizens united and on to this day and all of the voter suppression efforts american want to have exchanged counsel back when paul weyrich first started that in one nine hundred eighty he was saying i don't want everybody to vote elections are never decided by the majority of people they are now our leverage goes up in the election as the voting populace goes down the verbum quote. isn't one of the more important issues that we need to be addressing right now the integrity of our vote the voting machines and i can go on and on with the list but i you know the here's you know i think that this election has been interesting because the issue of voter suppression has risen to a different level than i've seen it in previous elections and i do think the integrity of our voting system is at the heart of our democracy and we are

witnessing one party eager to suppress the vote what we need is a democracy program we need money out voters and we need a public funding system we need universal registration we need a constitutional right to vote perhaps mandatory voting as many western industrialized countries have but we need to enhance our democracy tom and to be honest sitting here election night lets you know we're looking at eight to nine swing states which will decide this election i want my vote in new york state to count and we need to. unleash or you know take apart the vi's of the electoral college in the national popular vote something your viewer should go check out is moving along but there are so many important pro-democracy reforms that are not left nor are they right they're simply about small democracy which we should pay a lot of attention to well and one of the more. i think successful of those pro-democracy reforms when you look at the places where it's been played out is instant runoff voting in san francisco for example it was community several hundred

communities around across the country. that as a result of the tireless efforts over decades of the green party have now have i r v do you see any possibility of any reconfiguration of our voting process arguably we you know we have one of the oldest democracies in some ways and an actor mystic in federal very large madison was very worried about political parties you know i think i think that my sense of it tom you may have a different sense is that what's important in this next period is from the bottom up to really use those interesting electoral reforms that good groups like fair vote have worked on for so long i r v proportional representation and to find ways to bring more voices into the system i would begin from the bottom because there are hundreds of nonpartisan races in this country for sheriff or other positions and grow from the bottom up i don't like to emulate the right wing but that lewis

powell memo i cited earlier was also the you know would like to hatch things like alec the american legislative exchange council or the christian right and i think we need to take back power at the grassroots level and bring more voices and of course your important issue the money in politics until we can really address that and it is exciting to see the energy around resolutions opposing citizens united trying to overturn citizens united and other steps to getting money out of our system it will be very hard to have ordinary people's voices heard let alone seen ordinary people run for office if a position for example a senate position a senate race cost thirty million dollars even sherrod brown who i hope will win in ohio tonight you know spend seven or eight hours a day raising money that is not what this country should be about they should be doing the people's business not raising money absolutely brilliantly said katrina vanden heuvel thank you so much for being with us thank you. and we're back to

the electoral map now the electoral total is one hundred eighty four for romney two hundred seventy two for obama a significant development in the last few minutes of course and mitt romney picking up north carolina that was something that a lot of people were surprised to see obama win back in two thousand and eight not too big of a surprise but still pretty close this time around so once again north carolina going to romney but there's some interesting developments when we look sort of at individual counties around this country and know you were talking about florida you know this is a daily koz is reporting this it's fast and you go through all the various counties that president obama has to carry within certain ranges in order to carry the state and miami dade broward palm beach hillsborough orange. panellist duvall pollution seminole in every single one of those counties he's pulling the kind of numbers now they're not one hundred percent in but so far you know eighty to ninety percent he's pulling the kind of numbers he's going to need to win florida and florida he's

got the president and in virginia as well he's leading really pulling ahead in loudoun county that was one of the counties lot in prince william that everyone said will tell the story we're going to have a whole lot more that everyone in just a moment stay with us. is the state run english speaking russian channel it's kind of like.

russia today has an extremely confrontational stance when it comes to us. understand it. and realize.